


cold, cold, cold

by reogulus



Category: Succession (TV 2018)
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode s02e02: Vaulter, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:53:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25157302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reogulus/pseuds/reogulus
Summary: written for thesensory prompt"Lawrence - 1. cold, smooth slate"
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	cold, cold, cold

Lawrence remembers going through the motions—going upstairs to his office, one step at a time, going into his office where security and movers had already set up the cardboard boxes for personal effects, calling the lawyer on his ride back from the office, reading and re-reading the terms of the non-compete agreement, and thinking about running his elbow through the car window to bust it wide open. Everything plays back perfectly behind his eyelids as soon as his eyes are closed.

Lawrence was lucky that Tatsuya was in San Francisco visiting family at that time. It was a relief, to come back to an empty home that day—no explanations to formulate, no expectations to shoulder, no sympathies to acknowledge. After a simple dinner and a few too many whiskeys, he can lie down for his first early night in a long time. He was growing tired of holding in the anger, it was taxing him like balancing a jug full of water on top of his head, but he had nowhere else to put it.

_Because my dad told me to._

Lawrence mouths those words, tries to roll them around, to savor on the tip of his tongue like it was a sip of freshly brewed matcha. They don’t hold; he feels the syllables pass through his tongue, his lips meet and part to form the words, and then they’re vanished—from the world, but not from his mind.

He allows himself one Ambien, eventually. He needs to get up early tomorrow and ready to trudge through the rest of the shit show, there will be employees calling him, and then HR, and then lawyers again. Lawrence keeps his palms flattened against the sheets, counts down the minutes until sleep hits him.

Unluckily for him, sleep doesn’t come in the form of a dreamless slumber.

He finds himself back in the backyard of his parents’ old house, behind the screen door to the backyard. He doesn’t register that he’s not wearing shoes until he pulls the door open and steps out onto the cold, smooth slate of the patio floor. He loved to do this as a child, running around shoeless and giggling at his mother’s exasperated calls for him to put on some sandals, afraid he would catch a cold regardless of the season. The coldness of the slate seeps through his skin, creeping up from the balls of his feet to his calves. It was always a welcome reprieve, in the peak of summer.

Lawrence turns to look to his left. That, too, is part of muscle memory. The Japanese maple stands proud in the corner of the flowerbed, its red leaves fanned out like a cluster of bloody palm prints. He’d forgotten the dynamic colors and how they juxtaposed to create depth, the alluring depth of the brighter, paler hues fading to darker browns and maroons.

The Japanese maple is the only relic he took from his childhood home, after his father had passed. He let everyone else handle the estate, hired the best landscaping services he could find to ensure the tree was transported and planted in his yard—back before he moved to Silicon Valley, and then Manhattan. This was barely weeks after he’d raised Series A funding for Vaulter, and his mother had called at 2AM and Lawrence couldn’t get to the ICU fast enough to say goodbye before the time set on the death certificate. He knows now that that too was a choice, to delay in the face of the inevitable, to stay in the room because he’d immobilized himself in the name of work.

And everyone had assumed Lawrence would have done it differently if he could. The truth is, if he could, he still wouldn’t know for sure, and that realization perhaps kept him sleepless more so than grief. So he took the maple, and he tried to keep the tree alive instead. It wasn’t for penance so much as it was for remembrance.

He walks closer towards the tree, to stroke the vessels on a leaf that feel so much like blood vessels under his thumb, a different kind of lifeblood coursing through the body of a living thing. He keeps his eyes closed for a moment.

“What did your dad tell you, Lawrence?” Someone says to him, in a quiet voice, barely above a whisper, a drawl as flat as it is deep. He recognizes the voice, but nonetheless struggles to put a name to it. In his dream, he opens his eyes. The Japanese maple is no longer in front of him—his arm is still stretched out, fingers curled around an empty space, as if reaching for a futile answer.

He turns around and sees Kendall, standing there behind him, almost leaning over his shoulder, with those eyes that look as dead as the koi fish he couldn’t manage to keep alive that summer when he was ten, not even a fraction of light in those dark pupils blown huge from cocaine.

“What did your dad say?” He repeats. He’s dressed in black from head to toe, the harbinger of death.

“Why?” Lawrence can barely hear himself. He can feel it rising, the hair on the back of his neck, like he’s getting angry or cold.

“Because my dad told me to,” he watches Kendall’s lip move to spell out those words, once again, one side of his chin, greyish with stubble, that half-shiny spot from the remnant of another man’s spit.

Lawrence almost wants to reach his hand towards him, to wipe it off—as if that could settle the score and reset it all.

But Kendall turns his back to him, and he wakes up, heart racing, undershirt soaked in sweat. It’s still dark out.

In between mugs of coffee and fried egg whites, Lawrence manages to get through the morning without checking his personal phone. He picks it up from the couch, after lunch; a few messages from Tatsuya that all but ask if he’s okay, plus one missed call. He swipes the notifications off screen, taps on the Photos icon instead, and starts thumbing through to the bottom of the gallery.

He couldn’t bring the tree with him when he moved across the country and back into a high-rise, of course. Tatsuya bought a bonsai for his birthday a few years back—Lawrence hated it, the fucking hothouse flower that it was. Now he doesn’t have even that.

He finds it after a few minutes, the photo buried in a folder of childhood photos that his mom sent on WhatsApp. It’s a photo of the original one in the wooden frame with the yellowing edges, where he was small enough to only come up to dad’s waist, standing up all too straight under dad’s hand on his shoulder, next to the maple in the flowerbed. Both of them stood on the slate tiles, barefoot.

Lawrence studies the photo, inch by inch for details, as if to commit it all to memory. Eventually, he finds himself looking away. His thumb hovers over the delete button in the upper corner, only so briefly before he draws in a deep breath. And then he clicks the lock button and tosses the phone back onto the couch cushion.


End file.
